Food Waste

West Oxfordshire District Council is reponsible for collecting our food waste which is collected every week. Every household has been provided with an dark grey caddy for use outside and a small light grey caddy for use in the kitchen. You can use compostable bags to line the bins but you can use newspaper instead.

People are usually shocked by how much food they throw out - get a free recipe book with ideas on using up leftovers.

VIDEO: BBC After Life: The Strange Science of Decay (40 mins) Have a seriously "rotten" time with top bug man Dr George McGavin. A special webcast from the BBC Four After Life project in Edinburgh Zoo. "Maggots and Microbes" - for Science KS2/First and Second Level. Watch the life cycle of a fly unfold before your very eyes and see microbes at work like you have never seen them before.

VIDEO: BBC Fly Trap (1 min) Why you don't want to leave bottles of wine uncorked for any length of time - they attract flies!

The Oxfordshire Waste Partnership has produced a short video showing what happens to our collected food waste during the Anaerobic Digestion process by Agrivert at Cassington. This collecting and processing of our food waste has played an important part in Oxfordshire reaching a rate of 60% for recycling and composting.

A quarter of our food waste goes down the sink!

In UK households, we throw 1.9m tonnes of liquid food, drinks and alcohol down our kitchen sinks - that's more than a quarter of the 7.2m tonnes total edible food that's thrown out. WRAP report 2012

Do not pour oil down the sink or into the toilet, WODC will collect waste cooking oil or fat as part of the Food Waste Collection. Allow the oil or fat to cool - small amounts can be put in your food waste bin, large amounts should be put in a lidded, plastic bottle, such as an old drinks bottle, and either left in, or next to your food waste bin. (Cooking oil left in a glass container will not be collected)

Do not pour smoothies or yoghurts down the sink or into the toilet, pour them into your food waste caddy for collection by WODC.

Food Waste Bin

Bones

Chicken carcasses

Coffee grounds

Cooked food

Cooking oil and fat should be allowed to cool. Small amounts can go straight in your food waste bin. Larger quantities can be put in a lidded plastic bottle, such as an old drinks bottle, and left either in, or next to, your food waste bin.

Eggshells

Fish - including bones and scales

Food - ANY food waste, such as peelings, raw and cooked leftovers, bones and pet food can go in the food waste bin. (NO glass, plastic bags or packaging to go in with food waste - they should go in your black recycling box)

Fruit and vegetables

Kitchen towel - small quantities of kitchen towel can go in the food waste bin (even with bloody meat juices)

Meat

Pet food

Tea bags

Uncooked food

Home Composting

If you make your own compost then you'll find the food waste bin useful for things that you can't compost at home:

Cooked food

Meat

Dairy

Bones

You'll also be pleased that you can compost things that can't go in your food waste bin and would otherwise have to go in your light grey bin for landfill:

Use By and Best Before - What do these dates mean?

Many people are confused by dates on packaged foods, in fact so confused they throw food out when it will actually be OK to eat. So, do they mean the same thing? No, they don’t.

Use By

This is a safety date for perishable food, like meat and dairy products, which has an immediate health risk if it goes off and it is illegal to sell food past this date.

Best Before

This is an advisory date the manufacturer suggests for its taste and texture quality rather than safety, there would be no immediate health risk if it goes off. So don’t be fooled like so many people are, you don’t have to throw food out just because it is past the Best Before date. Just use your common sense and judgement, check the packaging isn’t damaged, that it has been stored according to instructions and try it out. The manufacturers are very conservative about Best Before dates, some give advice about how long they expect the food to be OK past the Best Before date, and this can be several years. Every day people in the UK throw out half a million teabags because they are past the Best Before date! Notice that wrapped bread only has a Best Before date.

Store fruit and veg in the fridge

Putting vegetables and fruit in the fridge will keep them fresh for about 2 more weeks than leaving them at room temperature.

Use the freezer more

From surveys, WRAP have found that most people only think of using their freezer for storing bought-in frozen food rather than freezing fresh food. Freezers are mostly full of frozen pizzas, ice cream, chips, and fish fingers – but your freezer is a fantastic facility for extending the life of food – but be sure to label it with date and a description. Those Buy One Get One Free offers are a marketing ploy resulting in consumers wasting food rather than supermarkets, but if you freeze them for use later on then the food won’t go off and you will have found yourself a bargain. Think of the freezer as like pressing the pause button and freeze food straight away when fresh. If you’ve cooked more than you can eat then, once it is cold, freeze it for use another day. Small portions are great for unexpected visitors or if you’re on your own and don’t feel like cooking. Fresh bananas can’t be stored in the fridge, they go black, but overripe bananas are easily frozen for making into banana cake, curries, or ice cream.

Do you waste food?

WRAP have found that 84% of people in the UK believe they don’t waste food and yet over 13 million tonnes of food are thrown out each year and 5.3 million tonnes of this is still edible, this is worth about £5 billion. People who have kept food diaries show that three ideas really help reduce food waste:

Plan your meals and therefore what to buy when shopping – 15 minutes of planning can save a family of four about £600 a year.

Measure things like rice, pasta and potatoes before cooking (using a mug to measure rice is quite easy), nationally we cook twice as much as rice or pasta as we actually eat – try using the portion calculator on the www.lovefoodhatewaste.com website.

Let people serve themselves so they don’t take more than they can eat and anything left over can be used for something else.

Chadlington Kitchen Garden grows fruit, vegetables and many varieties of salad on a vegetable plot with a polytunnel, asparagus bed and orchard in Chadlington. The CSA’s members pay a monthly subscription and in return receive a weekly share of the produce from the garden. Also order sourdough artisan bread from The Bread Shed - Deep Baked and collect at the same time.

Garden waste recycling - sign up now! From April 2017 household garden waste collections from West Oxfordshire District Council will cost £30 per bin, per year. To receive this fortnightly service, you will need to sign up. This can be done quickly and easily online with your credit or debit card. Alternatively, call 01993 861025.

Do you have mistletoe in your garden? Complete this simple form online to record your findings . Survey to produce a baseline to assess possible changes in the distribution of mistletoe due to predicted future climate change effects. So far mistletoe has been found on approximately 900 trees in southern Oxfordshire, with approximately 3,300 mistletoe clumps noted.

Welcome to Oxon:EEK, providing Oxfordshire with energy efficiency knowledge. Here you can expect to find useful information about how to reduce your carbon footprint. You may be interested in the money you will save or you may be interested in reducing your own personal climate impact. Either way you will find here information on:

Reducing your energy use and waste at home

How you could generate renewable energy yourself

Tips from local people who know about doing this

Links for further reading

Case studies from local people who have done it recently

Share your experiences

If you live in Oxfordshire and have had any experience in these energy efficiency measures, then your comments can be included on the site. Just fill in this simple form and send it through to oxoneek@lcon.org.uk